It is well known that in dispensing prescriptive drugs or medicines in the pill or tablet form, a multi-day supply is furnished to a person with the instruction that a portion of the supply is to be taken each day until the total number of pills or tablets is exhausted. Thus, a prescription may call for twenty one units of a medicine to be ingested for seven days at the rate of three per day. The daily dosage is to be apportioned during a day, but it is less important that each dose be equally spaced from the others than that the total daily dosage be consumed during the day. This is so because it is most likely that a person will ingest only one pill at a time but lose count of the numbr of pills taken earlier in a day.
Thus, it becomes important to provide means to enable a person to assure that the proper dosage of a medicine is taken daily. This is especially true in the case of elderly persons who might tend to be forgetful, or who might simply become confused because of the need to ingest a number of different medicines from different containers or bottles each of which might have a different daily dosage requirement. In a simple case, a person might have to take three pills of one type per day and four pills of another type per day. It is readily apparent that during the course of a day there may be uncertainty as to whether three pills of one type were taken or three pills of the other type. This, in turn, could lead to underutilization of the pills to be taken four times per day and overutilization of the pills to be taken three times per day.
The problem here mentioned has been discussed in the past. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 3,675,620 disclosed means for recording when a medicine dose is ingested. U.S. Pat. No. 3,931,891 discloses a pill bottle having a pocket section into which a daily supply of pills can be placed after being separated from the total supply in the pill bottle.